Judge Bruce Reinhart, the Florida federal magistrate who OK’d the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, allegedly donated to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, months after leaving the local US Attorney’s office to represent employees of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile who received immunity in a trafficking investigation.
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The FBI was searching the property for classified documents Trump allegedly had taken to the resort after he left the White House in January 2021, which is a violation of federal record-keeping laws. Fifteen boxes of classified documents were reported to the FBI as being found at Mar-a-Lago in February. Former President Donald Trump called the recent raid an “unannounced raid on my home.”
Judge Reinhart who authorized the reaid worked for 12 years as a federal prosecutor before entering private practice in 2008. An official biography that circulated at the time he became a magistrate judge stated that Reinhart “managed a docket that covered the full spectrum of federal crimes, including narcotics, violent crimes, public corruption, financial frauds, child pornography, and immigration.” The raid on the former President’s Florida resort was confirmed by Trump himself, who said Mar-a-Lago was “under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents.”
According to the Miami Herald, Reinhart had resigned from the South Florida US Attorney’s Office, effective on New Year’s Day 2008 to work for Epstein’s colleagues the day after. A few months after he started working for Epstein’s co-conspirators, Reinhart donated $1000 to the Obama campaign and $1000 to the Obama Victory Fund, the campaign’s fundraising arm, according to Federal Election Commission records. Reinhart also made a $500 donation to Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign in November 2015, as reported by the NY Post.
Also, Miami Herald reported that Judge Reinhart had represented many individuals that worked under Epstein, which included, as admitted by Reinhart, Epstein’s pilots, his scheduler Sarah Kellen, and the woman supposedly described by Epstein as his “Yugoslavian s-x slave,” Nadia Marcinkova. Both Kellen and Marcinkova were granted immunity in the controversial deal that allowed Epstein to plead guilty to state charges instead of federal crimes in 2007. He ended up serving 13 months in a county jail before being granted work release.
Two of Epstein’s victims accused Reinhart of violating Justice Department policies, claiming he changed sides in the middle of the Epstein investigation, which suggests he had spilled inside information to build favor with the defendant, reported the Herald in 2018.
In response to that, Reinhart said in a 2011 affidavit he hadn’t done anything improper and insisted that, given that he had no involvement in the federal investigation, he didn’t have any inside information about the case. This statement directly contradicts what his former colleagues said in a 2013 court filing, which claimed he had “learned confidential, non-public information about the Epstein matter” while still working for the US Attorney’s Office. Reinhart was asked in January of 2015 to appear on the right-wing channel Newsmax to give an analysis of the Epstein fallout. However, he declined to publicly note his own role in the case.